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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Patrick Radden Keefe and Mattathias Schwarz on marijuana legalization.
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Patrick Radden Keefe and Mattathias Schwarz on marijuana legalization.
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- [00:00]
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Curtis Fox
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, January 3rd. I'm Curtis Fox, producer of this program End this week for Dorothy Wickenden. In 1973, while President Richard Nixon was winding down the war in Viet, he set his sights on another enemy.
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Mattathias Schwartz
This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States. The Problem of Dangerous Drugs.
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Curtis Fox
In the magazine this week, Mattathias Schwartz writes about the drug war as seen from the Mosquito coast in Honduras. Patrick Radden Keefe has written about Mexican drug cartels and about the new law to legalize marijuana in Washington State. They both join me now. Patrick Just a a few days ago it became legal to buy marijuana for recreational use in Colorado, and Washington State is soon to follow suit. How big a deal is this?
- [02:13]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I think it's a very big deal, both domestically in terms of what this might augur with a changing legal framework for marijuana specifically, but also internationally in that it underlines some of the hypocrisy and the folly of the war on drugs that we continue to fight outside this country.
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Curtis Fox
Matt, what do you think? One of the drugs that Nixon declared war on was marijuana. The other one was heroin. What do you think of the significance of what's going on in Colorado and Washington state?
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Mattathias Schwartz
I agree with Patrick. I think it's a very big deal. And I think it's one of a few different signs that the sort of original passion and heart of these first generation Nixon era culture warrior anti drug heroes, I think the heart's gone out of the fight and people are looking at drugs in a more rational and less political cultural lens.
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Curtis Fox
So do you think that loosening restrictions on marijuana and legalizing it in some states, do you think that will transfer to harder drugs?
- [03:11]
Mattathias Schwartz
If it did, it would take a great long while. The marijuana legalization, which I think a lot of folks are perceiving as a kind of pilot, would need to go very smoothly. And there will be a lot of folks on the conservative side who will be ready to leap upon any misstep or any perceived side effect of this.
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Curtis Fox
Patrick, as you pointed out in the magazine last November about legalization in Washington state, implementation will be complicated. So what are some of the immediate issues Colorado is facing and what are you looking for?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It will be complicated, which doesn't mean it's not a good idea. We now have these two states which have legalized recreational use and then several dozen states in which medical use is already legal. But federally, to grow or sell marijuana continues to be a crime. So you've got a whole host of issues that Colorado and Washington are going to be dealing with having to do with who can buy, who can sell. I mean, just to give you one example. So you don't want to sell to minors, Right? Neither state wants to sell to minors and the federal government has said to both states, look, you better make sure if you're going to try this experiment that you're not selling to minors. But the problem is that according to some studies, roughly a quarter of the marijuana that's consumed is consumed by people who are under age. So who do these people buy from then? Are they going to be buying from the black market or gray market where the weed that's sold in those stores is then diverted to them in the manner that you would pay somebody to buy you a six pack at the liquor store? If that's the case, then you're not actually chipping away at the black market to the extent that a lot of the boosters for this change have said that you would be.
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Curtis Fox
David Brooks had a column in the New York Times this week saying that legalization is essentially condoning pot smoking and that the prices will plummet and more people will smoke marijuana. Do you buy that argument?
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Mattathias Schwartz
Well, reading Patrick's article, it's hard for me to imagine the price plummeting when, as Patrick shows, the state will be taking 25 and 35% excise in sales taxes at every link along the sales chain from field to store.
- [05:24]
Curtis Fox
So the price may not plummet. But what about the idea that marijuana use is being condoned and essentially encouraged by the state?
- [05:32]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I thought that was a pretty wrong headed column. First of all, I don't know that legalization will necessarily count as the state endorsing the consumption of marijuana. On the contrary, I think really in large part what the movement has been driven by is a, a revulsion at the whole criminal justice apparatus that has grown up around the criminalization of this drug. The fact that we have hundreds of thousands of arrests every year for marijuana related charges, that we have 70,000 people currently in prison on marijuana related charges, and that none of this has driven down consumption or in fact production of the drug, domestic production of the drug in this country. So I think that to the extent that we're seeing a big policy change underway, it's in part because people have relaxed a little bit and some of the stigma associated with the drug is beginning to diminish. But it's, I think, much more so driven by a dawning realization that the prohibition of the drug simply hasn't worked and that there have been huge negative consequences.
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Mattathias Schwartz
I'd just add too, that if David Brooks is right and these laws would essentially be condoning pot use, I'm not sure that's really such a bad thing. The column, as I read it, was kind of written from this white picket fence universe where everyone is spending their leisure hours writing the book of virtues and doing chin ups and sit ups. I just don't think that's an accurate picture of humanity. I mean, we know that Bill Bennett, who led the drug war in its early years under Bush number one, right? Yeah. Bush won in high stakes slot parlors where he was considered a whale by these casinos. And I'm not sure vice as a moral category is really the way to go in terms of directing human behavior.
- [07:25]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, to put a finer point on it, nowhere in that column does he mention alcohol, which whatever the metric you want to choose in terms of negative social outcomes, alcohol is far, far worse than marijuana. So, I mean, one Question that nobody really knows the answer to is whether with legalization you'll see what the people who look at this, they say is, are you complimenting or substituting? Are you going to have people who are basically using cannabis and alcohol, or are you going to have people actually giving up alcohol or using more cannabis and less alcohol? And if it's the latter, which could very well be the case, I think it's pretty hard to argue that that's not a better outcome.
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Curtis Fox
Matt, you write in your piece that the drug war has split into two. What did you mean by that?
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Mattathias Schwartz
I just meant that we're seeing this liberalization here within the United States where people are able to enjoy a closer and closer association with supposedly illicit drugs, both as producers and consumers. You know, as we've been talking about in Washington and Colorado, while abroad, the regime is very much as it was 10 or 20 years ago, where you have militarized supply side operations being undertaken to get people to stop growing and shipping the drug at gunpoint. And they use a lot of the techniques of counterinsurgency that we've seen in Vietnam and then Colombia and then Afghanistan. And the nature of counterinsurgency is such that, you know, from time to time the wrong people, innocent civilians, get killed, which is what we saw in Honduras last year. And, you know, I think there's an argument to be made that counterinsurgency is worth it if it can stop some terrorist organization from extending its tentacles around the globe. But is it really worth it to stop small to medium sized shipments of cocaine that we've known we can't prevent from arriving within the US for 20 or 30 odd years? And I would say that no, it's not worth it.
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Curtis Fox
So if counterinsurgency hasn't worked and drugs are getting into the country, in spite of all the efforts around the globe of the DEA and other agencies, why do policymakers persist in this strategy? Why has it lasted so long? Since Richard Nixon?
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Mattathias Schwartz
Basically, I would say some of it is inertia. You give an agency a budget and it's going to come back each year and ask for a raise and it's going to find a way to justify its own existence. And then some of it is that there are a variety of ancillary goals attractive to policymakers and attractive to folks in the military and in national security, that the drug war has achieved that have nothing to do with drugs, such as coming up with ways for our DEA and military to work with police and military abroad and to run quasi military operations through a variety of foreign bases overseas. And then just as a narrative, it's hard to go to the voters and say, let's make a deal with Colombia, to have our troops in seven different bases across the country because we want to run Colombia. It's a lot easier to say, do that, to keep a cocaine dealer from poisoning your children at the playground. That just packs a much bigger punch. So I think it works. I think the drug war works on this stump, whether or not it actually works out in the field.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick, I would agree with all of that, and I think, yeah, certainly never underestimate the power of bureaucratic inertia. The one small point I would add would be that in some instances, you have a problem which may have been effectively created by prohibition in this country, which then takes on a life and a momentum of its own. And this, I think, is true in Mexico, it was true in Colombia. It's true in a number of the Central American countries in which you get these very powerful criminal organizations which have the resources to corrupt local bureaucracies, to corrupt the criminal justice system, and I think, in that manner, to really kind of begin to erode the social fabric in a lot of these countries. And I can see some logic in wanting to go after these types of organizations, the cartels, the gangs sometimes associated with them. So I can see how, from the perspective of the DEA or the US Government at large or the Department of Defense, there's a logic in a kind of go after the bad guys sense to pursuing these organizations. The ultimate irony here is that I think it's often the case that in trying to pursue these bad actors, we end up partnering with other bad actors, or we end up empowering local folks who we're working with, who in many cases have been guilty of human rights abuses and end up adopting tactics in going after the bad guys, which are themselves pretty bad. And this is, you know, if this is a problem in counterinsurgency elsewhere as well. So it's a complicated sort of nest of issues.
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Mattathias Schwartz
Does cocaine need to be illegal to go after these bad actors? Or couldn't we just go after them for murder and for money laundering and illegal weapons and all the other terrible things they do? Do we need the cocaine laws on the books also in order to weaken them?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
No, we don't. And, in fact, if cocaine was legal, in theory, we would cut off a major source of revenue for them, and that would help weaken them. And then you could pursue them for, you know, the kidnapping, the murder, various other crimes. To go back to an earlier point in our conversation. I think that while we should celebrate the fact that it looks as though slowly marijuana is going to become legal on a federal level in the United States, I think it will take time. It's going to go state by state, but it seems at this point inevitable to me. I don't see legalization going beyond that anytime in the near term. Just politically, I don't see it happening. So it's a somewhat academic question. It's likely that cocaine will remain illegal for quite some time.
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Curtis Fox
Let me ask you about marijuana. The cartels from Mexico supply a lot of marijuana to the US Market. And so Colorado's legalizing it, Washington's legalizing it. Is that going to affect their business dramatically?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It's interesting. I mean, on the one hand, it has been a big revenue stream for them. Nobody knows how much, but you often hear the suggestion that marijuana is kind of the cash cow for the cartels, that it could account for 30 to 40% of their revenue. At the same time, if you look at Washington state, a lot of the boosters for legalization said, you know, we need to stick it to the cartels. We don't want to be supporting Mexican drug cartels. But if you actually go and talk to people in the pot business in Washington state, there's not a lot of Mexican marijuana making its way up to Washington. It's domestic weed. I mean, it's grown in state. In fact, what you could get from Mexico would be much inferior. So that's one question is whether, you know, until you actually saw national level legalization, you would really see a big impact on the bottom line of the cartels. And then the other issue is diversification. These are really adaptive enterprises. And while on the one hand it could seem appealing from a policy perspective to cut off their ability to make money selling marijuana, they will often diversify into other things which are as bad or worse. So we've seen just in the last five years or so a big shift, particularly into migrant smuggling, but kidnapping, extortion, other revenue streams. So many of these groups, we still call them drug cartels, but they've actually evolved into fairly diversified criminal organizations that are not just in the drug trade.
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Curtis Fox
Now, Matt, you reported from Honduras, which has been swept up in the drug violence afflicting the whole region. Can you give us a sense of how the drug war affects normal, everyday life of everyday Hondurans?
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Mattathias Schwartz
Well, most of the experience I had there was in a rural province called Gracias Adios. That's also known as La Mosquitia or the Mosquito Coast. I've talked to a fair number of people who have a better sense of what the atmosphere is like in the cities. And you know, Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. And people in urban environments, they pay war taxes to gangs, the police are very corrupt.
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Curtis Fox
But one of the surprising things that comes up in your piece is that the drug trade was at first kind of welcome in certain areas.
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Mattathias Schwartz
Yeah, that's in the more rural areas. In La Mosquitia for the last hundred years there have been a series of boom and bust cycles around natural resources. There was a wood boom, there was a rubber boom, there was a mining boom, there was a banana boom where you have these multinationals come in and employ everybody and then they leave. The only people who stay for the long run are missionaries from the Moravian Church. And in the beginning, I think the cocaine trade may have been perceived by locals as just another one of these resource based booms. That's changed now. There's a lot of fear there and a lot of the elders there don't like it. But they also know that they're essentially weaker than it and they know that the state's weak. So they put up with it, they try to reach some kind of accommodation with it. And that's how the ethnic group there, the mosquito, have survived for the last five centuries is when a sort of invading power comes in, they reach an accommodation and then just wind out outlasting them. But there's a lot of, you know, hostility and resentment towards, you know, these outsiders who come in and bring with them violence and addiction. And there's a lot of local indigenous anti drug sentiment in these communities that are simultaneously being accused by the US and others of being complicit.
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Curtis Fox
And there's a lot of hostility towards the US as well.
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Mattathias Schwartz
Yeah. And especially after this incident that I wrote about in May 2012 where, you know, you had four State Department helicopters swooped down seize a 400 kilo cocaine shipment and leave behind many injured people in the water and four dead, including two women and a 14 year old boy. That really resonated not just in the village where it happened, but throughout this federation of Tribal Councils that governs the region. They were so angry that they issued a formal order expelling the US from their territory, which is kind of a dead letter. They were very angry and they remain angry.
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Curtis Fox
Patrick, President Obama doesn't often mention drugs. So what is going to happen in the federal level in the next few years? All the action seems to be in the states. Do you expect to see anything in Congress or from the president, any change in drug policy?
- [18:21]
Patrick Radden Keefe
On the one hand, I think there'll be a tendency to just let this stuff play out and see how it works before you see any big changes on the federal level. On the other hand, I think there will be features of the next couple of years, even just with these two states that are going to require some response from Washington. There will be a couple of complicating factors. One is that I think other states are going to tip. I think you'll see referenda in other states. So that's one thing is that you'll have more and more states doing this. And then I think that there will be a bunch of issues which we'll have to resolve. One is the interstate flow of legal marijuana. So what happens when Washington state is producing this great legal weed, which you can buy legally in Washington? You can go as a tourist to Seattle and buy weed there. But what happens when you leave the state? Do you get a situation in which the black market in neighboring states are essentially importing legal weed from Washington? How's that going to work? Another issue is banking. There's still not a lot of clarity on what it would mean for a big national bank to actually be the bank for, say, a very successful recreational marijuana shop in Denver, Colorado. This has been a big issue. A lot of the dispensaries up to now are cash businesses because the banks are worried about the legal exposure of taking that money. So that's one issue which I think is going to require some sort of resolution either by the executive branch or by Congress.
- [19:43]
Curtis Fox
Okay, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks to both of you. Matthias Schwartz is a frequent contributor and Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer. You can subscribe to this podcast, the New Yorker Out Loud, and the New Yorker Fiction podcast in the iTunes store. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available at audible.com Subscribers can access the digital edition for tablets and phones at no extra charge from the App Store or from Google. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. Dorothy Wickenden will be back next week. I'm Curtis Fox.
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David Remnick
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charla remain the God and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
From PRX.